According to Dana Amir, when someone awakens our boredom, it frequently reflects their difficulty in giving meaning to their words. Instilled with meaning, the details of reality come to life, and thus boredom is often a symptom of an attack on the ability to afford experience with meaning (Amir, 2014). At the beginning, I found myself trying to infuse the dryness of T’s stories with fluids and life. I was seeking to open up blurred and coded words with questions and to bring to life some of the material, offering my thoughts and possible interpretations. I was carefully listening to hear the musical rhythm within every monotonous tone, searching for the emotional narrative in every story, and for the conflicted meaning behind every stuck word. Yet, I felt that, despite all that, T continued to spiral into the shell of meaningless utterance that at the same time imprisoned all my attempts to understand and to get closer.
The Hebrew word for meaning, mashmaut, is etymologically linked with discipline and obedience, mishma’at, bringing into mind the power that is entailed in the ability to provide meaning – to give an interpretation – a power structure that is always part of the analytic situation. Was I becoming like T’s father, speaking her words for her? Impinging my own point of view on her story? Perhaps, just like in my dream, she was speaking to me in an unfamiliar language that, at least in the beginning, I did not make an effort to approach. Within the psychoanalytic quest – to seek the truth, to articulate, to give meaning, to understand – I forgot my knowledge of Russian, which, although I did not speak or comprehend, was my grandmother’s tongue, and I knew something about it, something of it was familiar to me.